It's been raining pretty steadily since I got up around 1300, but I haven't seen any arks floating by and the power is still on, so I'm not too worried.
Going to head over to Wal-mart for some bandages*, since they were out on Thursday, and probably spend the evening doing laundry. Or something.
Most of my vile, treacherous friends are tied up doing family stuff, so I expect I'll probably be hanging out at home finishing Tim Powers' Three Days 'Til Never, which is shaping up to be another bravura performance of extreme weirdness.


David Weber's The Excalibur Alternative is an expansion of the short story he contributed to Foreign Legions, the anthology Jim Baen convinced him to assemble as a sequel to Ranks of Bronze, which itself was expanded from the original story about a Roman legion shanghaied into fighting as low-tech mercenaries for alien merchants. Weber's protagonist is an English minor noble, saved with his men (and their wives, camp followers, etc.) by the aliens from a watery death en route to the Battle of Crecy. Sir George Wincaster learns quickly, and as with the Romans, this does not end well for the alien traders. You could look at this as a more direct descendant of Poul Anderson's The High Crusade than Drake's story, but there's a lot more to it than that, and it's well worth reading.

John Ringo & Travis Taylor's Von Neumann's War combines a cast of interesting characters -a mad scientist and his Russian mail-order bride, a Hooters girl turned astrophysicist, some hardcore troops, and some redneck rocket scientists- in a nice tale about interstellar machine invaders that don't really care about humans but definitely want all their metal. Which is pretty impossible run modern civilization without. So -it's a puzzle story, it's a fresh change on the old Berserker stories, and it's got some awesome battle scenes just crying for a big-screen presentation. Recommended.


*And a screwdriver.